Getting Started with Email Marketing

What is email marketing?

Email marketing uses electronic mail (email) to deliver a commercial message to a group of people. Unlike spam, email marketing relies on permission-based, opt-in consent and may also use advanced features such as customer segmentation and personalization. Commercial messages sent with email marketing include company advertisements, business requests, and promotional offers, as well as solicitations for donations, involvement or support.

Beyond building customer loyalty and brand awareness, email marketing yields a high return on investment (ROI), second only to search marketing as the most effective online tactic. With email marketing, digital marketers can reach an audience who has specifically opted in to receive communication of interest, laying a strong foundation for customer acquisition and conversion. Almost half of American Internet users check or send email on a typical day.

Why you need an email marketing service like MailerMailer

If you've decided on email marketing, an email marketing service like MailerMailer will be your best bet. We take care of all the technical odds and ends, so you can focus on sending the very best messages. At MailerMailer, we're experts in dealing with ISPs and firewalls, managing your signups and unsubscribes, tracking your clicks, opens, bounces, and much more. You can also group and target your list members, as well as personalize your messages. We even offer free email templates and image hosting.

What are your email marketing goals?

Define your audience

You first need to determine your email marketing audience. In the broadest sense, these are people who have expressed interest in something you are offering. These people could be current or potential customers, fans, supporters, or members of a group. Consider the demographics of your audience, such as gender, age, location, and language. Also, think about what type of lifestyle they lead, including employment status, buying patterns, and computer literacy. If your audience falls into several groups, list each one.

Define your goals

Once you have your audience nailed down, you'll need to specify your goals. Consider why your audience wants to hear from you and what you can offer them through email marketing. You may want to encourage purchase of a service or product, acquire more donations and assistance, boost attendance, involvement, or support, or even increase traffic to your website.

Define your strategy

Based on your audience and goals, develop a strategy. You'll be refining your strategy as you go along, so consider it a working draft. For instance, you could send messages highlighting items on sale or offering coupons for your service. You could also send messages about company events to boost brand awareness and support. Think about how often you'd like to send. You'll want to send frequently enough so that your audience doesn't lose track of who you are and why they signed up, but you also don't want to flood their inboxes.

Test your strategy

Once you define your strategy, you'll want to test it. You may need to adjust the content, format, sending frequency, personalization, or other factors in order to achieve your goals. As your audience grows and company matures, continue to test your strategy. We'll talk more about measuring your performance later on.

Establishing your audience

Decide what information you want to collect from your audience

After you set up your account, you'll need to decide what information to collect from your audience. Reflect on their demographics and lifestyle. Think about information that would enable you to better target them and provide more relevant communication.

MailerMailer lets you collect standard information from your members, such as name, company, and location, by enabling standard fields. You can also set up custom fields to collect other text information, such as job title or middle name.

How to build your list

As you go about building your list, you must gain explicit permission from each and every member. Getting an email list from a trade show or organization, or from business cards you've collected, does not qualify as gaining permission. Moreover, lists that are purchased, rented, harvested, exchanged, or obtained from any third party source are illegal.

Taking shortcuts to properly building your list will backfire. Unsolicited emails provoke an abundance of bounces and complaints that quickly result in blocking, blacklisting, account termination, and legal consequences. Not to mention, the reputation of your company will suffer a serious blow.

If you want to build a solid email list, encourage people to fill out your signup form. In addition to posting it on your website, you can also print it out and build your email list offline. Collect email addresses face-to-face at your front desk or special events. Let people know what types of content they'll receive, and how they'll benefit. Be honest.

Ways to add members

MailerMailer offers several ways to add members to your list. If you already have a list, you can easily import the file. Your list must include only opt-in members who have specifically requested to receive your mailings. You can also manually add list members one at a time with our quick invite feature. They'll receive an email invitation to opt-in. Lastly, MailerMailer provides you with the link and code for your signup form, so you can invite members to signup from your website.

Email message anatomy

Subject line

Use a simple subject line that lets your recipients know what the message is about. Shorter subject lines generally perform better, but do your own testing to see what works for you.

Sender (from) address

Be honest and use sender information that your recipients will recognize. Otherwise, they may delete your message. MailerMailer lets you enter both a sender email address and sender name.

Physical address and unsubscribe link

According to the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, email marketers must include an address and unsubscribe link. The address should be the physical address of the publisher or advertiser— not a post office box or private mailbox. The unsubscribe link must be visible and operable within all emails, and able to process opt-out requests for at least 30 days after the transmission of the message. All opt-out requests must be honored within 10 days.

MailerMailer enables you to easily comply with these laws. After you provide your physical address, we include it, as well as your unsubscribe link within all our templates. Or, if you code your own messages or templates, you can include our simple mail merge tags for these items. Your unsubscribe link will always be operable, and opt-out requests are instantly honored.

Online view link

While optional, you can include a link to "View this email in a browser." MailerMailer keeps an archived version of each message you send. Just create a link using the mail merge tag for online view. If you use any of our system templates, this link will already be present at the top.

Plain text version

You'll need a plain text version of your email for people who can't or won't view HTML. Including it also sends a positive message to the spam filter because spammers don't take the time to create a plain text version. Your plain text version will be bundled together with the HTML version and sent out as a single email in Multipart-Alternative MIME format. Here at MailerMailer, we automatically make a plain text version for you with a link to the online view of your message. However, we recommend that you spend some time adding the actual content from your HTML version.

Creating messages

Using MessageMaker™ templates

MessageMaker™, our cutting-edge message creation tool, allows you to create beautiful messages no matter your skill level. You can select a pre-designed premium template, or customize one of our start from scratch layouts, adjusting fonts, colors, and images to match the look and feel of your brand.

Coding your own messages

If you're an HTML/CSS pro and prefer to code your own messages, that's fine too. When designing your message, keep in mind that email clients only support simple, table-based layouts and the most basic of styles. Anything too complex won't look consistent across email clients. Code your design using a good text editor. Avoid WYSIWIG text editor applications as they generally inject a bunch of code that may cause your message to break.

You can add your code to MailerMailer with our "Enter HTML" feature. Be sure to inline all your embedded CSS beforehand using our Magic CSS Inliner. You can host your images with us, or on your own server but make sure the image URLs are absolute, not relative, paths. You may be tempted to use a free image hosting service, but be forewarned— they put scripts that prevent email linking and can also set limits on bandwidth.

You can also add your code to MailerMailer with our "Fetch from website" option. Upload the message to your server and then enter its web site address on MailerMailer. You'll have the option for us to automatically inline your embedded CSS, so you don't have to do that beforehand.

Creating your own templates

One of the best parts about MessageMaker™ is that you can add your own templates. Templates can be added by either saving a draft or sent message as a template, or by uploading a template bundle. Once you add a template, it will appear within your account under "My Templates."

To upload a template bundle, you'll first want to read our How to Build Custom Email Templates guide. MailerMailer's template language allows you to create your own messages that are instantly editable and infinitely reusable within MessageMaker™. This can be especially convenient if you're coding a message for a client, and need to let them enter their own content.

If you need a hand, we also offer custom template design and coding.

Crafting the plain text message

After you've finished creating your beautiful HTML message, don't forget to spend some time on the plain text one. We automatically generate a plain text version for you, populated with a link to the online view of your message. However, to improve your plain text message, you should enter the same content from your HTML message and nicely format it.

Sending messages

Sending previews

You'll want to make sure the message you created looks great across all major email clients. Send previews to as many webmail and desktop email clients as possible. You can also send previews to your friends and family. For best results, use email test software like Litmus that can test in 30+ email clients and devices in minutes— you'll save yourself tons of time.

Targeting your list

You can send to your whole list, or use the categories you set up to target segments of it. Basic targeting allows you to select all members with certain responses. Advanced targeting lets you add wildcard characters to the text field responses (such as all members with an email address at a certain company, *@company.com). It also lets you inversely target list members by selecting those with no response for a given field or category.

Scheduling your message

When you're done targeting, you can send your message immediately or schedule it for the future. Generally, the best time to send is early morning, but you should test various times to see how your list responds. If you do schedule your message, keep in mind you can unschedule or reschedule it before it's sent.

Tips for avoiding spam filters

Spam filters check your emails and look for similarities with known spam. Here's some general advice:

Don't use bright red fonts or use complex styles

Don't use lots of exclamation points, question marks, or other punctuation

Also, make sure you keep your message code clean and include a plain text version— neither is a high priority among spammers. And, of course, only send to recipients who have given you explicit permission to send to them.

Archiving your messages

A message archive is a collection of your past email messages. Keeping a public archive shows people what they can expect from signing up to your list. You must first enable the archive on MailerMailer, and then tag the sent messages that you would like to be included. Enabling the MailerMailer archive also adds a toolbar to the online view for each of your messages, letting people share your message on social networks, signup to your list, and more.

Measuring your performance

There are various ways to measure the performance of your email campaign. Keeping track of your performance can reveal the best strategies for achieving your goals. While studies out there offer good sending guidelines, every list responds differently, so always do your own testing.

Once you send a message, MailerMailer reports will show your open, click, and bounce rate. Each of these metrics provides important information about how your message was received.

Open rates

Open rate represents the percentage of delivered emails that were opened by your recipients. An open can be inferred if images are enabled or a link within the email is clicked. However, some recipients may open the email but fail to enable images, so consider the rate an estimate. To boost open rate, experiment with date and time of send as well as various subject lines. Also, include a healthy amount of text, so recipients are encouraged to enable images.

Click rates

Click rate is calculated by dividing the number of unique clicks in your email by the total number of recipients, and expressing this number as a percentage. This value provides a measure of recipient engagement with your message. To increase your click rate, experiment with quantity and styling of your links. Also, consider various types of content and targeting in order to better engage your audience.

Bounce rates

Bounce rate indicates the percentage of sent messages that could not be delivered. Bounces can be hard, meaning delivery was attempted to an invalid email address, or soft, meaning the email server encountered an issue. High bounce rates can negatively impact your sender reputation and delivery rate, so you should try to keep them as low as possible. Using double opt-in signup will ensure that email addresses are active. You should also allow members to unsubscribe or update their preferences so your list remains current.

Other metrics

Aside from MailerMailer reports, you may want to keep track of other performance metrics. For instance, you can determine how many people unsubscribe after you send a message. A high unsubscribe rate could indicate a problem. If it's your first time sending, or you send infrequently, you will generally experience higher unsubscribe rates. You can also measure signups after you send messages. A spike in signups may signal that content was useful. To boost signups, experiment with a forward to friend link and always place the online view link at the top of the message. Lastly, observe your website traffic after you send a message. Increased traffic may suggest an effective email campaign.